Grantsfire Revolutionizes Grant Reporting

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New project makes publishing and sharing grants information easier for foundations and nonprofits.

Grantsfire's success depends on the participation of grantmakers themselves. We hope to generate as much support for this project and establish as many partnerships throughout the nonprofit and philanthropic community as possible

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB)March 25, 2009

Grantsfire, a project of Solpath, has received a $150,000 grant from The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to support the development and promotion of Grantsfire, a web-based system that aggregates and publishes grants information using Web 2.0 tools and technology.

Outreach

"Grantsfire's success depends on the participation of grantmakers themselves. We hope to generate as much support for this project and establish as many partnerships throughout the nonprofit and philanthropic community as possible," says Jason Ricci, Solpath's Executive Director.

Over the next 90 days, Solpath will embark on an extensive outreach campaign to the grantmaking community to encourage participation in the Grantsfire project. By leveraging multiple online communications channels, Grantsfire seeks participants interested in publishing their grants information utilizing the innovative, standardized and simple hgrant format.

Grantsfire will change the way grants are reported and how fundraising research is conducted. Using web 2.0 principles of openness, interoperability, and collaboration, Grantsfire will make grants information available to anyone through a search engine at http://grantsfire.org and APIs that will allow anyone to build mashups using Grantsfire data.

Web 2.0 principles have already transformed the technology sector. By applying these same principles to how foundations track and report their grants, Grantsfire aims to help nonprofits fundraise more efficiently in a time when funds are fewer and needs are greater. Grantsfire will ultimately reduce costs while increasing the timeliness and accessibility of grants data collection.

About Grantsfire

Grantsfire (http://www.grantsfire.org) makes up-to-date information on philanthropic grants widely and easily accessible through a network-centric strategy. Grantsfire pulls recently published grants information from foundation website feeds according to a simple unified standard called hgrant. Grants data is pooled, and the collective data is then searchable and publishable by key words and other sort criteria. Ultimately, Grantsfire will bring down costs and increase the timeliness and accessibility of grants data collection.

About Solpath

Solpath (http://www.solpath.org) is an organization created specifically to develop solutions that improve foundation grants management processes and software systems. Solpath is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California.

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, established in 1926 in Flint, Michigan, by an automotive pioneer, is a private philanthropy committed to supporting projects that promote a just, equitable and sustainable society. It supports nonprofit programs throughout the U.S. and, on a limited geographic basis, internationally. Grantmaking is focused in four programs: Civil Society, Environment, Flint Area and Pathways Out of Poverty. Besides Flint, offices are located in metropolitan Detroit, Johannesburg (South Africa) and London. The Foundation, with year-end assets of approximately $1.96 billion, made 558 grants totaling $110.4 million in 2008. For more information, visit http://www.mott.org.